Trickster

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Buck Moon
Birthday - Hunter Thompson (writer)
Birthday - Nelson Mandela (statesman - S. Africa)
Constitution Day (Uruguay)

 

I think the Joker is a god.

 

No, really. I think he occupies a part of our psyche reserved for archetypes. Just because the medium has changed—now we have pop culture instead of fancy classic culture, because we all know that fancy classic culture was never pop culture—doesn’t mean we all don’t still have all these stories that float around and change with the retelling.

 

Sure, Bats is in the pantheon, too—he’s popular because there’s something about him we need in our narratives—but I’ve been thinking of the Joker more lately because I'm a shameless Joker fangirl and because of a certain event that brought him to the foreground in this movie. He’s the trickster and the force of chaos, in the same sense that Loki or Eris or Coyote or Anansi are (although he’s definitely on the dark end of the spectrum). Only he, as the modern version, actually resonates with us. I say this because—well, because people are saying he killed Heath Ledger.

 

I’ve heard a few stories about this—Heath is a method actor, and he got too into the role and looked into the abyss and couldn’t take it and killed himself; or maybe it was an accident, but by god he wouldn’t have been taking those sleeping pills if he hadn’t been so shaken by his role as the Joker. Now I myself think that you’d have to have some other problems first to let that get to you—if the role did anything, it was to exacerbate something that was already there that made him need those pills.

 

But see, that doesn’t matter.

 

The fact that we are willing to say the Joker did it—that this fictional pop culture character, a character originally made up for a one-shot run who seemed to hit a nerve and stayed—means that we think he’s got some power. People are willing to believe he reached through the fourth wall and actually did something physical, and that he is dark enough to scare someone that much. And since his kind of power is over our minds, thinking he’s got the power gives him power. It’s like profanity, or economics, or any superstition or religion or other form of magic people really believe—it’s not real, but we behave as if it has some bearing on us. And our reaction to Heath’s unfortunate death, among other things, proves that crazy clown has definitely got that power.

 

He's in our heads, and our belief creates and sustains him, and even gives him some tangible strength. 

That, my friends, is how gods are born.

 

 

The movie’s pretty good, for the record. The attempt to make Bats sound like Kevin Conroy* In Stereo was sorta silly, but c'mon! It’s made entirely of climaxes, and some people may recognize that one character arc is all about the DC idea of One Bad Day.  What more could you ask for?

(Possibly my favorite moment is the Disappearing Pencil, because it was so perfectly a summation of the Joker: every member of the audience in my theater curled up into a horrified ball and burst out laughing when he made it disappear. I don't think I've ever seen that reaction to anything that strongly before.)

 
*The only true voice of Batman.

Comments

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

I was actually thinking something similar by the end of the movie--well, and the way Christopher Nolan kept talking in interviews about how their Joker was supposed to be "pure chaos" and that's why they didn't want him to have an origin. But to me, it was cemented when the last we saw of the Joker was that he was >>hanging upside down. It was like a literal image of the Twelfth Night Lord of Misrule, when everything is reversed. (You even see specific reversals, like the clowns being the "hostages" at the end and so on.) It was also the image of the Hanged Man in the tarot deck, although that has a different meaning--usually sacrifice or submission? I don't know how much you can read into that. I guess you could argue that the Joker wants you to give in to chaos, to the temptation to stop fighting for what's right (the way he thought the people on the two ferries would give in to their worst instincts). But I don't know how well the Hanged Man aspect can be argued, when the trickster/Lord of Misrule is so much more present.

But more importantly to what you're saying, nothing happened to the Joker--I mean, we're left to surmise that law and order and/or the asylum took care of him, but there's no point in Nolan showing that because he just... is. He's a force, not a person. He's literally above the law. <<

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

He always gets off on the insanity plea in the comics, too, which says something, I think--that people both in-universe and out can't really blame him for his actions, because that's what he's FOR. He doesn't really have any say in it, because he's a force or an archetype.

It's a little like explaining something about Pan's Labyrinth to people: I was more horrified when humans would do awful things to each other than I was at the Pale Man's tendency to eat children and fairies, because that's what the Pale Man was created to do. The humans can choose what to do to each other, but the Pale Man was just doing what he was supposed to; being angry with him is like blaming a volcano for the human suffering it may cause. It's pointless. I think we sort of put the Joker in there, too.

And the really creepy thing is in the stories he seems to know people think like that, and is using that to his advantage. He is written as being a lot more aware that he's in a story than the other characters, and even seems to know what part he has in the story--and he uses that knowledge in-story to manipulate others. It gives us the illusion that he knows we're out here watching him--and that he may in fact be able to come out among us if he chooses. And so when Heath Ledger died we started to wonder if maybe it was him ...

I'd have to look deeper into the Hanged Man, but the Joker is definitely in our mental deck--and he knows that, too.